development environment tweaks

In this article, I want to share a tip for managing your development modules. When developing sites with Drupal, developers can choose to use modules to aid development. Devel is one of the most well-known development module, there are more of them. It is unwanted to have these modules present on the production environment because the can be a security risk and put unnecessary on weight performance.

An option is to put them in sites/all/modules/development and add this path to your .gitignore file. It works though you need to download your development modules separate for each project.

The solution I am using is, to create a global directory in say ~/.drupal_development_modules and install your development modules here. From your projects you can create a symlink in your sites/all/modules directory to this directory:

ln -s  ~/.drupal_develoment_modules/ development

Make sure to add the development symlink to your global .gitignore file:

# Development stuff
sites/*/modules/development
*/sites/*/modules/development

This way your Drupal instance can access your personal set of development modules by creating one symlink.